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A surge in TrueBot activity was observed in May 2023, cybersecurity researchers disclosed. "TrueBot is a downloader trojan botnet that uses command and control servers to collect information on compromised systems and uses that compromised system as a launching point for further attacks," VMware's Fae Carlisle  said . Active since at least 2017, TrueBot is linked to a group known as Silence that's believed to share overlaps with the notorious Russian cybercrime actor known as  Evil Corp . Recent  TrueBot infections  have leveraged a critical flaw in Netwrix Auditor ( CVE-2022-31199 , CVSS score: 9.8) as well as  Raspberry Robin  as delivery vectors. The attack chain documented by VMware, on the other hand, starts off with a drive-by-download of an executable named " update.exe " from Google Chrome, suggesting that users are lured into downloading the malware under the pretext of a software update. Once run, update.exe establishes connections with a ...

An analysis of the Linux variant of a new ransomware strain called BlackSuit has covered significant similarities with another ransomware family called  Royal . Trend Micro, which examined an x64 VMware ESXi version targeting Linux machines, said it identified an "extremely high degree of similarity" between Royal and BlackSuit. "In fact, they're nearly identical, with 98% similarities in functions, 99.5% similarities in blocks, and 98.9% similarities in jumps based on BinDiff, a comparison tool for binary files," Trend Micro researchers  noted . A comparison of the Windows artifacts has identified 93.2% similarity in functions, 99.3% in basic blocks, and 98.4% in jumps based on BinDiff. BlackSuit  first came to light  in early  May 2023  when Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 drew attention to its ability to target both Windows and Linux hosts. In line with other ransomware groups, it runs a double extortion scheme that steals and encrypts sensitive data i...

A survey of global cybersecurity leaders through the 2023 Certified CISO Hall of Fame Report commissioned by the EC-Council identified 4 primary areas of grave concern: cloud security, data security, security governance, and lack of cybersecurity talent. EC-Council, the global leader in cybersecurity education and training, released its Certified Chief Information Security Officer Hall of Fame Report today, honoring the top 50 Certified CISOs globally. This report reveals that approximately 50% of surveyed information security leaders identified cloud security as their top concern. Findings from the report suggest the top cybersecurity concerns with which organizations struggle and highlight the need for implementing robust security frameworks with skilled cybersecurity professionals to effectively contain emerging threats. On average, an enterprise uses approximately 1,295 cloud services, while an employee uses at least 36 cloud-based services daily. Cloud security risk is real for ...

If you invite guest users into your Entra ID tenant, you may be opening yourself up to a surprising risk.  A gap in access control in Microsoft Entra's subscription handling is allowing guest users to create and transfer subscriptions into the tenant they are invited into, while maintaining full ownership of them.  All the guest user needs are the permissions to create subscriptions in their home tenant, and an invitation as a guest user into an external tenant. Once inside, the guest user can create subscriptions in their home tenant, transfer them into the external tenant, and retain full ownership rights. This stealthy privilege escalation tactic allows a guest user to gain a privileged foothold in an environment where they should only have limited access. Many organizations treat guest accounts as low-risk based on their temporary, limited access, but this behavior, which works as designed, opens the door to known attack paths and lateral movement within the resource t...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has fined Amazon a cumulative $30.8 million over a series of privacy lapses regarding its Alexa assistant and Ring security cameras. This comprises a $25 million penalty for breaching children's privacy laws by retaining their Alexa voice recordings for indefinite time periods and preventing parents from exercising their deletion rights. "Amazon's history of misleading parents, keeping children's recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents' deletion requests violated  COPPA  and sacrificed privacy for profits," FTC's Samuel Levine said. As part of the court order, the retail giant has been mandated to delete the collected information, including inactive child accounts, geolocation data, and voice recordings, and prohibited from gathering such data to train its algorithms. It's also required to disclose to customers its data retention practices. Amazon has also agreed to fork out an additional $5.8 million ...

Spanish-speaking users in Latin America have been at the receiving end of a new botnet malware dubbed  Horabot  since at least November 2020. "Horabot enables the threat actor to control the victim's Outlook mailbox, exfiltrate contacts' email addresses, and send phishing emails with malicious HTML attachments to all addresses in the victim's mailbox," Cisco Talos researcher Chetan Raghuprasad  said . The botnet program also delivers a Windows-based financial trojan and a spam tool to harvest online banking credentials as well as compromise Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo! webmail accounts to blast spam emails. The cybersecurity firm said a majority of the infections are located in Mexico, with limited victims identified in Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Guatemala, and Panama. The threat actor behind the campaign is believed to be in Brazil. Targeted users of the ongoing campaign primarily span accounting, construction and engineering, wholesale distributio...

Data security is reinventing itself. As new data security posture management solutions come to market, organizations are increasingly recognizing the opportunity to provide evidence-based security that proves how their data is being protected. But what exactly is data security posture, and how do you manage it?  Data security posture management  (DSPM) became mainstream following the publication of Gartner® Cool Vendors™ in Data Security—Secure and Accelerate Advanced Use Cases. In that  report , Gartner1 seems to have kicked off the popular use of the data security posture management term and massive investment in this space by every VC. Since that report, Gartner has identified at least 16 DSPM vendors, including Symmetry Systems. What is Data Security Posture? There certainly is a lot being marketed and published about data security posture management solutions themselves, but we first wanted to dig into what is data security posture?  Symmetry Systems define...

The Chinese nation-state group known as  Camaro Dragon  has been linked to yet another backdoor that's designed to meet its intelligence-gathering goals. Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point, which  dubbed  the Go-based malware TinyNote, said it functions as a first-stage payload capable of "basic machine enumeration and command execution via PowerShell or Goroutines." What the malware lacks in terms of sophistication, it makes up for it when it comes to establishing redundant methods to retain access to the compromised host by means of multiple persistency tasks and varied methods to communicate with different servers. Camaro Dragon overlaps with a threat actor widely tracked as Mustang Panda, a state-sponsored group from China that is known to be active since at least 2012. The adversarial collective was recently in the spotlight for a custom bespoke firmware implant called  Horse Shell  that co-opts TP-Link routers into a mesh network capable of ...

U.S. and South Korean intelligence agencies have issued a new alert warning of North Korean cyber actors' use of social engineering tactics to strike think tanks, academia, and news media sectors. The "sustained information gathering efforts" have been attributed to a state-sponsored cluster dubbed  Kimsuky , which is also known by the names APT43, ARCHIPELAGO, Black Banshee, Emerald Sleet (previously Thallium), Nickel Kimball, and Velvet Chollima. "North Korea relies heavily on intelligence gained from these spear-phishing campaigns," the agencies  said . "Successful compromises of the targeted individuals enable Kimsuky actors to craft more credible and effective spear-phishing emails that can be leveraged against sensitive, high-value targets." Acting in tandem, South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA)  imposed sanctions  on the North Korean hacking group and identified  two cryptocurrency addresses  used by the entity that have rece...

A critical flaw in Progress Software's in MOVEit Transfer managed file transfer application has come under widespread exploitation in the wild to take over vulnerable systems. The shortcoming, which is assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2023-34362 , relates to a severe SQL injection vulnerability that could lead to escalated privileges and potential unauthorized access to the environment. "An SQL injection vulnerability has been found in the MOVEit Transfer web application that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to gain unauthorized access to MOVEit Transfer's database," the company  said . "Depending on the database engine being used (MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or Azure SQL), an attacker may be able to infer information about the structure and contents of the database in addition to executing SQL statements that alter or delete database elements." Patches for the bug have been made available by the Massachusetts-based company, which also owns Teler...